"...Terzo?"
"Copia?" Terzo whirled around, blinking rapidly as he tried to discern his surroundings, tried to find where his brother's (so strange, calling him that) voice had come from.
Terzo was stood in a dimly lit room somewhere in the basement of the clergy, he recognized it easily, with windows lining the top of the wall revealing that it was night time and it was raining rather heavily, wind howling like a banshee and raindrops pounding against the glass. Looking down, Terzo could see that he was stood in a circle, the circle surrounded by runes painted in red.
He hoped it wasn't blood.
Looking up from the circle, Terzo saw him.
"Copia!" Terzo took a step forward, ready to welcome his brother officially to the family, ready to tell him everything that he had learned since his death, ready to just talk about everything.
Copia took a step backwards.
Terzo stopped.
"...Copia?" Terzo watched as Copia stared at him, the Cardinal showing clear signs of fear - why fear, why was he scared? - in how his body was tensed, how his eyes were wide.
"Terzo?" Copia hesitantly asked, a tremble to his voice, "Can you speak? Are you really here?"
"...what?" Terzo blinked, "I am speaking?"
Copia didn't seem to hear him, only staring at him with an unnerved look.
"Hello..?" Terzo spoke slowly, but Copia didn't seem to hear, "why can't you hear me?" Terzo asked, to the still air since the target of his question seemed to be deaf to his voice.
"Let's see if I can answer that..."
Terzo turned as he heard Mary's familar voice, his brow furrowing as he saw his guide crouching down low over the runes which made up the summoning circle drawn out on the floor.
"How did you get here?" Terzo asked, the bloodied singer certainly hadn't been in the room when Terzo had been looking around earlier, and Terzo doubted that Copia was going around summoning dead singers that the Cardinal likely didn't even know had existed.
"I can follow you anywhere, I'm your guide. It's apart of the job," Mary shrugged and moved around the circle, examining each symbol with a careful eye, pointing over to Copia as he did, "he can't see me though. Only the person he summoned. I'd say he could only hear you too, but it seems that isn't the case at the moment."
Looking back to Copia, Terzo could see that the part about being only able to see him was true. The Cardinal was still standing frozen across the room, staring at Terzo with no reaction to Mary, who was only a foot or so away from him.
Mary moved to crouch over a set of symbols on the floor, tilting his head as he squinted at them.
"This isn't right," Mary tilted his head even more, as if he was trying to imitate an owl, squinting at the symbols drawn in red on the floor and tracing them lightly with a pale finger, "it looks like he missed a line there... and of course that's the rune which allows your voice to rise from Hell, to reach his ears."
Of course it was, nothing seemed to come easy to Terzo.
"So he can't hear me?" Terzo huffed, "At all?"
"Nope," Mary shook his head as he rose from his crouch, "and he won't be able to unless he fixes the symbol."
"And he's smart, he would have been careful copying it from wherever he found it," Terzo sighed, "so it's probably wrong at the source."
While the Clergy probably had the best collection of instructional books in the world when it came to summoning rituals - each and every Ghoul came from Hell, of course -, it seemed even their books were not infallible to mistakes.
"Looks like this won't be as easy as you thought." Mary said.
Shaking his head, Terzo examined the room, seeing a mirror behind Copia, as well as a red marker - so it wasn't blood, good - lying on the floor beside Copia's shoes.
Maybe he could...
"Can I touch things, when I'm summoned like this?" Terzo turned to ask Mary, while Copia moved to furiously flip through a book which he was now holding (presumably the one which he had found the ritual in, Terzo doubted he would find anything that would help).
"You should be able to," Mary nodded, "if he got those symbols correct, of course."
Well, only one way to find out.
"Alright, maybe I can write a message, he can at least read," or, well, Terzo assumed he could read. He wasn't actually sure how much the Clergy had offered the Cardinal in terms of schooling. He was Nihil's right hand man and did a fair amount of paper work, so Terzo made the fair assumption that the man would could read.
Terzo took a step forward towards the mirror, but stopped when Copia stumbled back a step once again, clearly terrified.
"Terzo, don't hurt me!" Copia cried out, dropping his book to the floor and raising his hands in fear, "I promise I didn't know!"
Terzo turned to Mary with a bewildered expression.
"I get that I'm dead and sort of a ghost, but why is he so scared of-" Terzo started, only to be cut off as lightning crashed outside and Copia jumped with a squeak like a frightened mouse.
Terzo didn't continue, too busy staring at the mirror that was leaning against the wall behind Copia. When the lighting had illuminated the room, for just a moment Terzo's attention had been pulled to the reflection of himself that had been brightly illuminated.
He looked, frankly, terrifying.
"Oh..." Mary looked from the mirror to Terzo, grimacing, "that makes sense, honestly."
"Can't blame him," Terzo grimaced as well. He was pale, as pale as death (hah), and the almost white canvas that was his skin made the brilliant red of his eye and the red streaks that covered him stand out brilliantly. His neck was a garrish scene of blood, and seeing it on himself was certainly horrific. A deep cut encircled his neck, blood lazily oozing from it and disappearing in streams that trailed beneath his shirt. But it wasn't Terzo's neck that caught his attention, it was the state of his face. His face was also covered with red, similar to his neck, streaks running from his forehead to his chin, streaming down his jaw and covering his ears. Crimson dots were also spattered across his skin, like he was straight out of a murder scene (which, to Copia, Terzo supposed he kind of was).
Raising a hand, Terzo dragged a finger through one of the reddish streaks that crossed his chin.
Bringing the digit - also spattered with red dots, he noted - up to his nose, it smelt of Gluttony, of fermented fruit and rot.
It wasn't blood.
"The fruit... this is all fruit juice!" Terzo turned to Mary, "probably from when we hid from that pig... thing, before the last vision."
"Makes sense, but it sure looks like blood, though," Mary nodded back towards Copia, "you have to admit that you certainly look the part of a vengeful ghost covered in blood and gore as you are, I can't blame him for thinking you're about to murder him for taking over the band or something like that."
"No," Terzo pursed his lips, exhaling heavily through his nose, "hopefully he'll read my message before he passes out from fear I guess. Not much else we can do with him not being able to hear me."
Mary nodded, moving back to examine the runes of the faulty summoning circle.
Ignoring how Copia squeaked and almost fell ass over heels in his rush to get to the other side of the room as the dead ex-Papa approached him, Terzo marched towards the mirror. He quickly swiped the marker from the floor, removed the cap, and raised it to the mirror.
With a quick swipe at the corner of the reflective surface to make sure the marker worked, Terzo got to work.
Carefully drawing each line, making the letters big so Copia could read them in the dim lighting from his spot far across the room, Terzo began his message.
I
Terzo heard shuffling from behind him, what he assumed was the sounds of Copia moving ever so slightly closer to see what he was doing.
"I..." Copia murmured from behind him.
I k
I kn
I kno
I know
"You know?" Copia took a step back, his shoe smudging against one of the symbols lining the circle as he stated at the message Terzo had scrawled on the mirror.
The marker suddenly dropped from Terzo's hand, falling to the ground and rolling into the shadows. When he reached out, his hand couldn't smudge the writing on the mirror.
"...and there goes your symbol for being able to touch things. Today is just not your day." Mary dead-panned from behind him, standing next to Copia's shoulder, Terzo turning to level an unimpressed look at the guide.
"This is not going well." Terzo sighed, all this trip to Earth had accomplished was making Copia terrified of him, making the poor Cardinal think Terzo was a vengeful spirit that didn't have any good intentions.
Granted, he didn't have good intentions when it came to Sister or his father. But Copia wasn't on that list.
"You know, in hindsight, you probably should have went with a different message," Mary pointed to the mirror, grimacing.
Terzo turned back, and grimaced as well.
"Yeah, I can't blame him for misinterpreting that one... I just wanted to let him know that I know we're brothers," Terzo sighed, "he was always so alone and I want him to know he's not, even if I'm not really here."
In dark red streaks, reminiscent to blood and looking straight out of a horror film, the words "I know" were spelled out on the mirror, the remaining words missing and leaving a rather eerie message. And with Copia already scared of him, Terzo really couldn't blame the poor Cardinal for misinterpreting the message and assuming it was Terzo letting him know Copia was leading the band and not being happy about it or something.
"I just wish this was- wait!" Terzo turned to complain about the situation when he spotted Copia moving, his foot creeping to toe the unbroken line of the circle that created the summoning circle that tied Terzo to the Earthly plane, "I think he's-"
Before Terzo could finish, Copia swiped his foot through the circle and the room abruptly disappeared.
"...ruining the circle," Terzo sighed, wrinkling his nose as he was assaulted by the scents of Gluttony once again.
"Well," Mary Goore started, "that went well."
"That went horribly."
"Same thing down here, really," Mary shrugged, before reaching over to gently pat Terzo on the shoulder, "cheer up, I'm sure we'll find some way to get through to him without scaring his socks off."
"Hopefully..." Terzo sighed, his shoulders slumping, "there's just so much I want to say to him."
There was so much Terzo didn't get to say while he was alive, so much he wanted to tell Copia.
He didn't know if he'd ever get the chance.